


bite the hand

by fawnlike (amainiris)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Mind Games, Power Dynamics, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:54:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25175704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amainiris/pseuds/fawnlike
Summary: It would be easier to call it love at first sight. Maybe less humiliating, even. He could claim, so convincingly, that‘I loved him. I loved him and because of that I didn’t want to be alone. I loved him and he took advantage of my disadvantage; he wound me like a clockwork toy. He carved out a hollowness in me so that he could spoon feed me something else in its place.’Hannibal, after all, is someone acclimated to certain appetites, to the ravages of hunger. Will has the impression that the other man has lived his whole life starving, that something essential in him has fallen away and nothing ever came to fill the lack.Until he met Will.He only loves him like this because he knows no other way.Where Hannibal's mind games drive Will to the brink.
Relationships: Will Graham & Abigail Hobbs & Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 18
Kudos: 55





	1. just a small part of me

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be updating this regularly. Slowwww burn.

_He only loves him like this because he knows no other way._

It ends where it begins. Will picks up the fifth of Bulleit and the whiskey inside gleams like captured sunlight, elusive and sweet; he is tempted to twist the cap, to drink it straight from the bottle, but resists. His hands shake slightly as he places it back on the table. No more, he tells himself sternly — no more of that. 

Maybe he’ll last until nine o’ clock, or eight. Maybe he’ll survive a day without it. He doesn’t know, and that frightens him.

He has a right to be this way, though, Will thinks, rubbing his weary eyes with the heels of his hands. He has a right to be this way because there is simply no other method of enduring; he has a right to be this way because he is already turning into the dark and terrible thing that Hannibal has tried to make him. On the backs of his eyelids he sees the doctor in sharp relief: the broad lines of his cheekbones, almost like a cat’s, the gleaming wet-blond hair and shadowed amber eyes. His coy half-smile, as if he’s always consumed by some joke Will can’t hope to understand. Being around Hannibal exhausts him, and yet now it’s the only thing that ties him to the world. The only thing that reminds him why he’s alive.

But stories should start at the beginning.

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


When he meets Hannibal, he can’t say that he doesn’t know what he’s in for. The doctor, for all his sophisticated diction, his more-than-vaguely-accented sureness of authority, exudes a raw cunning that Will is unsure of how to apprehend. From the very beginning they’re at odds, butting heads, clashing incessantly in the fevered way of those who are either very alike or very different. Sometimes Will just can’t tell, and that frightens him.

“I don’t find you that interesting,” he claims. And he doesn’t. At least not then.

It would be easier to call it love at first sight. Maybe less humiliating, even. He could claim, so convincingly, that ‘ _I loved him. I loved him and because of that I didn’t want to be alone. I loved him and he took advantage of my disadvantage; he wound me like a clockwork toy. He carved out a hollowness in me so that he could spoon feed me something else in its place.’_ Hannibal, after all, is someone acclimated to certain appetites, to the ravages of hunger. Will has the impression that the other man has lived his whole life starving, that something essential in him has fallen away and nothing ever came to fill the lack.

Until he met Will.

But Will doesn’t want to be the manacle that cuffs Hannibal to existence.

  
  


*

  
  


“The Minnesota Shrike…” Hannibal’s voice trails off, but there’s something deliberate about it, as there is with almost everything he does. Will turns in the half-light, the sun bleeding gold through the blinds of Quantico, and he’s only politely curious.

“What, Dr. Lecter?”

“Have you truly considered why the victims are impaled?”

Will scratches at the back of his neck. “He wants to humiliate them. Even in death.” He pauses. “Especially in death.” It’s the obvious answer, but it’s not what Hannibal is looking for.

“But why do shrikes impale their prey?”

Will sighs, presses his palms briefly against the flat of his abdomen before exhaling. He senses the other man’s eyes on him, quiet, watchful. Patient. “Because they’re weak. They can’t do anything else. They’re not like hawks or falcons, they’re not—”

“Do you know what shrikes are sometimes called?”

A ripple of unease passes through Will. “No.”

Hannibal drifts closer, close enough that Will can feel the proximal heat of his body. “Butcher birds,” the doctor says softly, leaning over so that he can leaf through photographs. He smells of something heady and alluring, almost toxic, similar to power; Will shifts away, uncomfortable for some reason that he can’t name.

“Butcher birds.” Will repeats the words, tastes them in his mouth.

“They are hunters, but butchers first and foremost,” Hannibal says, as if it’s all exhilaratingly simple. “Some of them actually allow the meat to cure. They leave it out in the sun for days.” He drifts through the photographs, the girls in them so pretty and so demure, so _ordinary._

“They’re intelligent,” Hannibal continues unnecessarily, and the lights of the room have thrown his eyes into shadow. “Do not underestimate him, Will. This Minnesota Shrike. He has his pride.”

He pauses, scattering the photos almost carelessly across the table. “These girls are not what he wants.” And his gaze comes to Will again, quiet, solemn. With all the power of a searchlight.

“He wants something—someone—else.”

That night, as Will is leaving, Hannibal offhandedly asks if he knows a place nearby to have a drink. Will, never one to associate with colleagues more than he absolutely must, refers him to a nearby bar and is surprised when the other man invites him along. It’s true that he hesitates. It’s also true that he rarely turns down a good whiskey.

They end up in an old dive that Will likes merely because it’s clean, out of the way, and the drinks are cheap. Here the walls are panelled wood, the floor is linoleum and the tv blares the local news; he can practically sense Hannibal’s distaste, well-concealed as it is by that congenial smile. Will ignores it. He ignores almost everything until the whiskey is in his hand, gleaming for all the world like sunlight, drunken and dizzy; he catches Hannibal looking at him curiously, but glances away evasively underneath his lashes. He doesn’t want any questions about his drinking habits, certainly not from Hannibal Lecter.

The doctor orders a Manhattan and doesn’t drink it. Will doesn’t find this curious until later.

“Are you so certain that you don’t find me interesting, Will?” Hannibal asks eventually, when their conversation turns from the Shrike to more mundane matters. Though his voice is quiet, it has a strength of projection that Will’s doesn’t. 

For one brief wild moment Will almost thinks the man is flirting with him. But no: there’s a depth of intent underneath his words that is the exact opposite of levity. Will swallows the whiskey like it’s fire in his throat, compulsively, and presses the half-empty glass to the bar. 

“I’m as certain that I won’t as you are that I will,” he says shortly.

“Are you a betting man?” 

“I don’t like losing money, if that’s what you mean.”

Hannibal considers him thoughtfully. Will hates to admit that he feels strangely _seen_ in Hannibal Lecter’s presence — but he also has the impression that being so visible to a man that astute isn’t necessarily a good thing. He shifts away, uneasy, always unable to lock eyes with him, and swallows the rest of the whiskey reflexively. Orders another.

“What is it about me that you find so deeply uninteresting?” 

Will is beginning to regret coming out here with him, but the whiskey is warm in his hand.

“I’m not a man of many words, doctor,” he says. He looks down at his drink and blinks, dark lashes breaking like a wave against his cheek as he does so. “I’m sure you’d eviscerate whatever excuse I came up with.” A bitter smile.

“I don’t want to eviscerate you, Will.” 

“And I don’t want to play these games with you.” The drink is getting to his head; the evening light is lurid and gold and streaming through the window; Hannibal is watching him with uncannily dark eyes, shrewd and aquiline. Almost like a hawk’s, or some other bird of prey.

“What game?”

“Whatever this is,” Will says, gesturing to the room around them. “Why you brought me here.”

“Not everyone has an ulterior motive.”

Will looks at Hannibal, and Hannibal looks at him; in that moment, he thinks they must see the coldness of their expressions reflected on the other’s face.

“You’re not sure about me yet,” Hannibal continues. “I understand. I wouldn’t be, either.”

Will takes a last swallow of whiskey, even as the room looks eerily bright to his eyes. He’s slipping into the looseness the alcohol can offer to him, but in that moment he can’t allow himself to be kind.

“I don’t do well when people analyze me,” he says frankly. As if that’s all that needs to be said.

“Neither do I,” Hannibal says, tilting his head slightly, so much like a cat. “We have that in common, don’t we?”

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


He doesn’t allow himself to get truly drunk. He doesn’t allow himself to let his guard down with Hannibal, to relieve the doctor of his suspicions, to put the other man at ease. He doesn’t owe him anything, least of all his reassurance. But there’s a moment before they leave the bar, and Will is turning to hold the door for Hannibal, and the dying sun is throwing the doctor’s face into shadow — and their hands brush. A little thing, but Will still knows that most men would pull away, or laugh awkwardly, or reassert their dominance. Hannibal doesn’t. He presses his fingers down over Will’s palm, so briefly, meets Will’s eyes in a way that can’t be coincidental.

And Will feels a little dizzy, a little resentful, a little drunk.

But he doesn’t hate it. He doesn’t. And that’s what worries him.

  
  



	2. reparations

He first sees Abigail Hobbs wrapped in the arms of her father. A knife to her neck, a forearm to her throat, as if the man can’t decide whether to hold her close or to kill; it would all be almost comedic, if it weren’t so absolutely awful.

The wife is already dead, throat cut into a gory smile on the front porch, the life having drained from her like blood. Will has seen this before: the raging husband, the woman bold enough to stand in his way. But there’s something different about this one, something unfamiliar, and it’s not until he sees Garret Jacob Hobbs with a knife to his daughter’s jugular that he understands how the wife was always on the periphery. Collateral damage, he thinks, even as he steps over the body - tragic. 

It amazes him how dedicated people are to living lives that aren’t theirs. The woman had carved out a space for herself, existed alongside her husband - but had never truly been a part of his world. Nor had the daughter. Not really.

The girl looks just how he’d expected, though, those stark blue eyes widened in fear as she gasps against the blade. Pretty in an innocuous way, young, dark-haired. Something turns in his stomach and he acts reflexively, demanding that the man drop the knife. But Garret Jacob Hobbs already knows that he’s lost everything - everything - and doesn’t hesitate to take more with him when he goes. When he slashes the blade against his daughter’s throat her eyes go even wider, as if in disbelief, and Will discharges five rounds neatly from his gun. 

Fear is the purest motivator. Will knows this, and he knows that Abigail Hobbs does, too. 

He isn’t so sure about Hannibal. 

  
  
  


*

  
  


When Hannibal closes his hands around Abigail Hobbs’ throat, her eyes go to Will. Blue, wide. Pleading. 

As if she’s not being saved at all. As if she’s being spared by the wrong man, and she knows it.

  
  


*

  
  


The hospital is sterile and silent and white, the nurses’ smiles so trained they look nearly permanent. Everything is clinical, cold, strangely reassuring - but not as reassuring as the brief pressure of Hannibal’s hand on his shoulder, the weight of it, the evasive fleeting touch of warmth.

“She will live,” Hannibal says as they sit at either side of Abigail’s hospital bed. For the first time since Will has known him, he looks… tired. Old, and tired. 

“You saved her,” Will says stupidly. He wants to offer a thank-you, but feels as if it would be ridiculous. It’s not his life that Hannibal spared, after all. 

“We saved her,” Hannibal says. Will doesn’t reply. It doesn’t feel as if he saved her - she’s lying there with a tube down her throat, after all, bone white with the almost-black hair violently dark against her skin. He itches, strangely, to move out and touch her hand. He doesn’t. It would feel wrong, like a violation, and she’s known enough of those.

When the nurse comes in to record vitals she looks at them both warily, as if uncertain as to what exactly they’re doing here. Will can’t blame her for that, and something inside of him squirms - not at the reality but at the sudden awareness of her too-keen perception. He doesn’t really want to know what they look like, the two of them huddled around Abigail’s bedside, watchful as carrion crows. His mind goes back to Garret Jacob Hobbs, the Minnesota Shrike, the flock of birds rising into the autumnal sky above Abigail’s home like screams, black clouds of treacherous intent. 

_He loves these girls,_ he’d told Jack. _Or - he loves_ one _of them._

Abigail lays unmoving on the bed. Strange, how the consequences of love and hate often look much the same.

“She has no family now,” Will says quietly. It’s this that truly bothers him.

“She has us,” Hannibal says in return, and Will hates the eager unexpected turn in his chest at the sound of it. The nurse pauses at these words, twists at the waist to survey them in turn: Hannibal, effortless and almost leonine underneath the relentless hospital lights; Will thoroughly anxious, agitated, thumbing the side of his nose and wishing desperately that she’d leave before she got any other ideas. He feels a flush creep up his neck at her eyes - watchful, guarded - and the way they coast over him, offering no judgment save for utter suspicion. No doubt she’s seen plenty of deviant men, he thinks.

“We’re with the FBI,” he says simply, as if that begins to explain it. She nods and smiles wordlessly, and takes her leave as quietly as she came.

“You didn’t owe her an explanation, Will,” Hannibal says. It sounds almost like a rebuke. 

“I most definitely did,” Will snaps. What, exactly, does the other man think? That they’re going to carve a home for Abigail out of the little mercy she’s been shown, shelter her against the harshness of the adult world? He’s suddenly horribly irritable at the insinuation, that he’d want anything to do with Hannibal in such a role - as if it’s a weakness, a tenderness that neither of them should allow themselves. Besides, he’s never considered the gentleness of the other man before, and it makes him uncomfortable in a way he can’t pinpoint. 

Hannibal goes very still. He is both panther and housecat, Will thinks: demure when he must be, thrillingly aware, prescient, at all other times. It’s the panther that frightens Will now.

“Are you embarrassed?”

“Are you psychoanalyzing me?” Will shoots back.

“No,” Hannibal says. He relaxes a little in his chair; Will finds himself mirroring him, and relaxing in response. “Merely asking a question.”

“What would I have to be embarrassed about?” It’s a barbed retort, and it sinks into the air with the sharpness of teeth. Hannibal doesn’t look deterred.

“Embarrassed at the prospect of other people making the wrong assumption about us,” Hannibal replies smoothly, with the exaggerated patience one gives to a child. 

“There’s nothing to assume,” Will says. “There is less between us than there is between me and the President of the United States.”

A smile, then - a quirk of Hannibal’s mouth, so endlessly amused. “That isn’t true. You can tell yourself that, but it isn’t true.”

Will almost blurts it out - _then what is between us?_ He catches himself at the very last second, hating the nameless tension in his shoulders, the ever-present sensation of Hannibal’s quiet eyes on him. He feels, sometimes, as if he never escapes the other man, as if Hannibal is with him in rest or waking, in the very annals of his dreams.

He suddenly wants a drink very badly. 

“You’re presuming things about me,” he says, finally.

“I would never, Will.” It’s blunt enough to be genuine honesty. Almost blunt enough to be true.

  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  


It’s so easy in retrospect, so sickeningly _easy,_ to look back and map out the circumstances that allowed for their meeting, trace the paths like arteries, though he never does find the heart. He walks these roads again and again, agonizing over them, over what he could have done differently, what he could have done _right_. 

He flushes with an acute shame when he considers the things he’s given to Hannibal, offered up as one does at an altar. Unwitting, infantile, guileless as a child. 

The memory of the first time Hannibal seizes him by the collar, pushes him up against the wall in his office and lays a forearm against Will’s throat chases him in waking and in sleep. He dreams about it, unsure of whether he wants to relive it or be relieved of it, the crush of Hannibal's mouth and the heat of his body. Will had always unconsciously assumed he would be cold, like a marble statue; he isn’t. He’s warm, and firm, and receptive in more ways than Will would have thought to expect. And Will hates it, that Hannibal was right about this, about them. 

Later, he wonders - feeling vaguely absurd all the while - if the other man’s thoughts ever went something like this: 

_I will starve you in more ways than you knew were possible. I will turn you inside-out. You will never know how many different ways there are to want until I’ve hollowed out every space within you and left you ravenous. The claw marks you feel on your insides when you inhale are mine._ You _are mine. You always were._

Promises and threats sound so similar in Hannibal’s mouth, and it seems believable enough to him.

  
  



	3. whiskey sweet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a bit shorter than usual - my apologies! I've been having some health issues that make it difficult to write, but I'm trying my best. :) Thanks for reading! Hopefully these will come more consistently soon!

Whiskey has a bite to it, an edge. There’s something reflexive about taking a shot, the flick of his wrist and the compulsive jerk, like swallowing fire. The heat in his throat followed by the slow release. The ease of it, like slipping into a shirt he’s worn a dozen times before.

It doesn’t always feel good, not exactly — and he supposes that’s strange to admit, even to himself. But at least it always feels right.

By this time — by the time Abigail Hobbs has awoken, and he is aware that nothing will ever be the same again — Will is drinking almost nightly. Not by himself, not always. Sometimes Hannibal joins him, or Jack, or even Beverly, for a glass of wine.

But mostly Hannibal.

There’s a ritual to what they do. Will aligns the two shot glasses like twin bullets, pours the whiskey and waits for the other man to lift the glass to his mouth. Will watches, trying not to be too curious, too watchful, too _aware._ He isn’t sure if it works. He observes, instead, the ripple of Hannibal’s throat when he swallows, the working of his jaw and how he wipes the back of his hand against his mouth. He sees everything, he thinks. He sees the emptiness that Hannibal has tried so hard to conceal. And then Will lifts the shot glass to his own mouth, and tastes the fire on his tongue, and wonders if Hannibal experiences it the same way. A tartness, sweet as Tennessee honey, luxurious as liquid gold. 

“You’re thinking again,” Hannibal observes, on one of those dizzying nights where they can speak of almost anything at all.

“I am,” Will says.

“About what?” It sounds like the doctor is genuinely curious.

Will grimaces as he sets the shot glass, with force, back on his kitchen counter. “Abigail Hobbs.”

Something flickers in Hannibal’s eyes, evasive and quiet. “You cannot save her from everything, Will.”

“I can save her from some things,” Will says, rather boldly.

“Not from her own past.”

“I’m not trying to save her from the past,” Will says. “I’m trying to save her from the future.”

Will pauses by the sink, staring out over the fields, the tumbled autumn-and-gold. The sun is giving itself back to the earth, dying quietly, and the stars are swaying dizzily through the curtains of receding light. It’s almost glorious, almost beautiful, how the sky empties itself of light.

“Is that wise?”

Will half-turns, looks at Hannibal standing there innocuously with an empty glass in his hand. “Is what wise?”

“Becoming so involved.”

“You’re the one who said —” But Will can’t finish the sentence, not truthfully. He remembers what Hannibal said, of course. _We are her fathers now._ Fathers, plural, that dizzying world of possibility. And then the crushing realization of who they truly are. Not men fit to father anyone, much less an eighteen-year-old girl burdened with the impossibility of grief.

“I know what I said, Will,” said Hannibal, so patiently. “Perhaps you misinterpreted it.”

Will almost chokes.

“Misinterpreted?” He doubts it. And yet this strange admission is something that he’ll only allow in front of Hannibal. He doesn’t want anyone else to know who he is — _what_ he is. 

Whatever that means. Uneasily, as Hannibal comes closer to place his own glass on the counter beside Will’s, he tries to edge away. Fails, because Hannibal’s face is very close — and then, so is the rest of him. Will shrinks back, feels the counter cut sharp edges into his lower back. Like he’s some fearful preyed-upon animal. And maybe he is. But he’s something else, too.

“Yes,” says Hannibal, very softly. “Misinterpreted. It is easy to do.”

“Like I’m misinterpreting this?” It’s a bold thing to say, but then, the whiskey is wiring its way through his veins and a heat is rising to the surface of his skin. He doesn’t know if it’s anger or something else. 

It’s disorienting to be so close to anyone. He thinks that if he leaned forward he could smell the whiskey on Hannibal’s breath. The doctor’s face is feline, unreadable and almost pretty, almost beautiful — yet his amber eyes are dilated black. For one mad moment Will think it’s lust. And then he reminds that’s not how Hannibal functions — so well-orchestrated, so perfectly controlled. So astute and so fine-natured that even Will can’t read the blankness of his eyes, the willfulness like an animal’s. 

Will’s house suddenly seems much smaller for the company within it. There is the kitchen table, the counter with its bottles of fire-whiskey and vodka, the dogs gathering around their feet. But then there’s Hannibal, sharp cheekbones almost hideous in the receding light, so close that Will can make out every individual eyelash. Will wants another drink. He wants something else, too. 

“What do you think you’re misinterpreting?”

Will is bone-tired of Hannibal’s games and yet he can’t stop engaging. The only comparison he can possibly see is the wired heat of alcohol, the hot swallow of whiskey, that craving for something more. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he says finally, trying to play at being distracted, rubbing his glasses on the hem of his shirt. But the truth is this — he has never been so attentive in his life. Hannibal’s head is half-tilted, cat-like as ever, the ghost of a smile on his lips. It’s obvious that he knows what Will wanted so badly to say; it’s obvious that he takes pleasure in watching him squirm under the searchlight of his amber-dark eyes. Will wonders: why is it so much harder to care for someone than to hate them? And anyway, he barely knows him, both strangers under that empty sky, bloodless and white as bleached bone. One of the dogs comes near, nudges his leg with his wet nose, and Will scratches him behind the ears.

“What you feel matters to me,” says Hannibal.

“Does it?” Snappish, willful. “I feel like you’re trying to trap me, Dr. Lecter. And I feel like it’s working.”

Something softens in those sea-dark eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you, Will.”

“No, maybe not,” Will says, and reaches at last for the bottle of whiskey, the drunken captured sunlight within. “But that’s not the same as wanting to help me.”

“You care about Abigal Hobbs.”

“Of course I do.”

“And so do I.” But Hannibal is such a flawless liar that it makes Will hesitate.

“Why?” he asks, finally. “Why do you care for her?”

It’s then that the most astonishing thing occurs; Hannibal lifts his fingertips to Will’s cheek, just so briefly, moth-light, lamb-soft. Will can feel himself shudder, so faintly that he hopes the other man doesn’t notice. He barely notices himself.

“I take in broken things,” Hannibal says, and the unspoken is barely unsaid.

Will thinks of Abigail Hobbs, blue-eyed, blank-eyed, hair ash-autumn-dark. He doesn’t like to think of her as broken, nor does he wish to think of himself in the same way. When his gaze flickers back up, the red bloom in his cheeks from Hannibal’s touch fading, it is impossible to grasp what the other man is feeling. He smells of something distinct — cologne, maybe, and that elusive scent of power — and his expression is convoluted as a map. 

“She’s not broken,” Will says, finally. Wishing Hannibal would take a step back. Wishing he’d take a step further.

“No,” Hannibal says, and there’s the sweet sourness of whiskey on his breath, gentle as a kiss. Will licks his lips. “Not if we help her.”

“And will we?”

Hannibal smiles, steps back almost reluctantly, and Winston whines into his hand. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Will.”

Will looks down. “And is that a lie?”

Hannibal reaches out again, runs his fingertips over Will’s sun-darkened forearm. “Of course not.”


End file.
